Model of a metallurgical reactor
ERAMET is a global industrial company in the field of Mining & metallurgical operations (pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy)
At the corporate R&D facility in Trappes (France), 150 engineers & scientists work at the optimization of industrial processes (pilots) and at the development of new ones (e.g. Wade Bay Nickel)
Challenge
The industrial processes studied are complex systems, with strong coupling of several phenomena in hostile conditions (e.g. very high temperatures). Moreover this conditions evolve during the process.
It underlines the need for numerical models in conjunction with the physical pilots.
Model
The chemical reaction that we are modeling is the reduction of the carbon concentration, through the usage of oxygen:
The kinematic of this reaction is mathematically modeled by an ordinary differential equation(as displayed above).
Solution
Here is the architecture of the processing implemented in Scilab:
Results
To obtain result on our problem, we use a specific solver for both discrete/continuous ODEs:
